Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty, formally Liberty Enlightening the World, is a colossal copper statue of a robed woman holding a torch, standing on Liberty Island in the harbour of New York. A gift from the people of France to the United States, it was designed by the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, given an iron framework by Gustave Eiffel, and dedicated on 28 October 1886. Conceived to honour American independence and the end of slavery, it came above all to stand for the welcome given to immigrants arriving by sea.

The project is traditionally traced to a conversation in 1865 between Bartholdi and Édouard de Laboulaye, a French jurist and abolitionist who had backed the Union in the American Civil War. The National Park Service has since judged that story a legend from an 1885 fundraising pamphlet and thinks the statue was most likely conceived around 1870. The Franco-Prussian War, in which his native Alsace was lost to Germany, delayed matters, but in 1871 he sailed to New York and chose Bedloe's Island, which every ship entering the port had to pass and which belonged to the federal government.

Bartholdi drew on Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, but deliberately avoided the image of revolutionary liberty, giving his figure flowing robes, a radiant crown and a torch for progress. In her left hand she holds a tablet inscribed with the date 4 July 1776, and a broken chain lies at her feet, partly covered by her robes. The skin is of thin copper sheets hammered into shape. When the original engineer, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, died in 1879, Eiffel replaced his planned masonry core with a flexible iron pylon to which the skin was loosely fixed, an early example of curtain-wall construction.

Laboulaye launched the Franco-American Union in 1875: the French public would pay for the statue and Americans for the pedestal. Bartholdi built the torch-bearing arm first, and it went on display at Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition in 1876 and then in Madison Square Park in Manhattan; the head followed at the Paris World's Fair of 1878. French schoolchildren, citizens and 181 towns contributed, and the finished statue was presented to the American ambassador in Paris on 4 July 1884.

American fundraising stalled amid economic depression and criticism of the gift's cost. Richard Morris Hunt designed the pedestal, built inside the star-shaped walls of Fort Wood, an old army fort on the island, but work stopped for lack of money. In 1885 Joseph Pulitzer used his newspaper, the New York World, to raise $102,000 from 120,000 donors, most of them giving less than a dollar each. The statue arrived in crates that June, was assembled once the pedestal was ready in 1886, and was dedicated before President Grover Cleveland; the celebrations included the city's first ticker-tape parade. The poet Emma Lazarus had written her sonnet "The New Colossus" for a fundraising auction in 1883, and in 1903 it was mounted on a plaque in the pedestal.

The torch proved too dim to work as a lighthouse, and in 1901 the statue passed from the Lighthouse Board to the War Department. Around 1900 the copper turned green as a protective patina formed. Millions of immigrants passing through nearby Ellis Island saw the statue as their first sign of a new home. In 1916, during World War I, German saboteurs blew up a munitions depot on the Black Tom peninsula close by, damaging the arm; the climb to the torch has been closed ever since. President Calvin Coolidge made the statue a national monument in 1924, and in 1933 it passed to the National Park Service. During World War II it went dark under blackout rules, except for brief lightings such as on D-Day in 1944.

Bedloe's Island was renamed Liberty Island in 1956, and Ellis Island joined the national monument in 1965. Inspections for the centenary found serious corrosion and a dangerously weak right arm, and from 1984 to 1986 the statue was closed while Eiffel's iron armature was entirely replaced with stainless steel and the torch remade. A campaign launched by Ronald Reagan raised over $350 million for the statue and Ellis Island, and the statue reopened in July 1986 for its centennial. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1984. After the September 11 attacks in 2001 access was restricted, and the crown did not reopen until 2009; further closures followed Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the COVID-19 pandemic.